The Journey 297
Wednesday, October 24
Read: Acts 4: 32-37
     Marketing and advertisement was something that business houses, the retails shops used to do to advertise their products. But today it seems that more than the business houses and retails shops, it is the different church’s that use advertisement, both through print media, radio network, while the majority advertising through internet and their web page to advertise about their church. Each day you find church’s proclaiming loudly “ Come and attend our Spirit filled Worship”, “Hear the sermon– sermon of a life time”, “Come and experience the mighty power of God”. The attractive slogans and dictums goes on and on. Hence today you have also the main line church’s adopting the strategies of the mega church's’ to remain in God’s business. A new book titled “Sons and Daughter” by Pastor Brad Boyd of the New Life Church basically critiques the style of functioning of the newly sprouting mega church’s or smaller church’s.  A Christian Post reporter Lillian Kwon, has written a wonderful article about this book and about the observations about Pastor Boyd. According to Pastor Boyd, it is a battle between hype and Holy Spirit in the church’s. He says that today every church is trying to create a hype in the church through latest praise and worship songs that is sung, the sermons that is going to be preached next Sunday, claiming all of this as a work of Holy Spirit. With the result of this hype is that church today is full of consumers rather than true worshippers of God. Thus  church’s of today have built marketing strategies, borrowed practices from the corporate, capitalistic and entrepreneurial world so that it becomes relevant to the people. Pastor Boyd says that his goal is not to make his people happy and create a consumerist type attitude in the church but more than that he says what he wants to do in his ministry is to give his members directions in life, that comes from ones submission to the Holy Spirit.  What Pastor Boyd is talking about is something that every church member, a pastor or a clergy needs to seriously think about. I understand the need of the church has to be relevant for the times, but by being relevant I feel we should making our members more and more committed to the gospel rather than consumers of the gospel .
                     We are meditating on the theme “ Transformed Living” and the portion that we shall meditate is from Acts 4: 32-37. The whole book of Acts describes the not only about the growth of the church but also the nature of the church. There are various accounts of how the church functioned in its early stages of growth. The portion for our meditation in Acts 4, describes the life and ministry in the church and of believers in  general and about Barnabas in particular. One of the hallmarks of believers of the early church was that as they gathered for worship and fellowship, the message of the gospel transformed them and they became more and more committed in their life and to the gospel message. It is this commitment that is seen by their action of seeing that nobody had any private possessions of their own and each of them consciously saw to it the needy people were taken care of. It is in such a context that we find the incident of a Levite named Joseph bringing  the money that he got by selling his field and laying at the feet of the apostles. It is this Joseph who is renamed Barnabas by the apostles.  Thus we find that through the life style of believers in the early church that both worship and ministry of the church transformed the very living and life style of early Christians. Church was not a super market for them where every need would be taken care of, thus converting people who come to worship more as consumers but church was a furnace for them, a refiners fire that transformed their life through the gospel message. Hence as each and every parish and church tries to ape corporate strategies to reach out to the people, and make the church and its ministry relevant, we need to deliberately take steps so that we create more committed and transformed followers of Christ rather than consumerist Christians whose attitude can be like that of a soda can. Break open a soda can, the first few sips are wonderful, but keep the soda can open, the fizz goes off and the soda could be sometime worse than water. Let us not go for the fizz while attending church. Let us think whether our participation in the worship and ministry of the church make us committed to Christ or just consumers of the gospel?